My primary research area is American social history, but my special interests are at the intersection of rural history and the history of American immigration. More precisely, my work engages the recent historical debate over the "invention of ethnicity" by examining German American community life in rural Minnesota. I am especially interested in over-lapping patterns of intra-communal conflict produced by divergent provincial origins, generational transitions and the systematic integration of the area into larger commercial networks. The latter was promoted by a class of small town merchants who appeared in the years around the turn of the century, and these men, in order to serve class interests, as well as to resolve their sense of cultural and social marginality, invested heavily in the task of reinventing local identity. Much of my research has involved a retrospective ethnographic examination of changes in community culture as a second-generation merchant class reworked traditional community rites and rituals and attempted to graft them to American cultural expressions. However, the ability of the merchant class to construct new institutions and to reformulate a more romantic meaning of local identity was limited by a persistent strain of town and farm conflict and anti-German hysteria of the World War I period. Merchants who looked to the Vaterland and to an idealized version of the German past as the basis for German American identity saw their efforts frustrated by the universal assumption of German war guilt. The result of all this tension and conflict was delayed assimilation and the incomplete romanticization of ethnic culture.

• Historical Geography


• The History of Race and Ethnicity


• Demographic History


• The History of the Family


• Nineteenth-Century U.S.


• History of American Catholicism


• European Social History